a black box. And when we break it open we're going to find an envelope that says one of two things: 'Congratulations, you've just won the Arab Germany, a powerful country that just had a bad leader and now is just ready to take of(' The other envelope says, 'Congratulations, you just won the Arab Yugoslavia, and you are the new Tito.' I wrote that at least once or twice before the war. And so I was a bun- dle of contradictions, is the real truth." Friedman writes about context; he lav- ishes metaphors on the social and eco- nomic forces behind change. And this process has an element of play: at the head of a table, he'll press his palms together, put his fingertips to his mouth, and lean forward with a smile that says, "Folks, you're going to love this." His thoughts are often about the range of possible thoughts (and a range can always include the sunniest: one of Friedman's favor- ite column constructions is "The good news. . . the bad news"). He doesn't bring unbending Orwellian principles to a de- bate. Indeed, as he put it to me, "I've only understood my books when I've had to go out and explain them." He aims to engage readers-"Y ou cotÙdn't make this up!"- not convince them. (This means that on the occasions when he assesses people sharply- Y asir Arafat, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin-his words have partictÙar moral force.) With "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and, later, "The World Is Bat," Friedman became Americà s guide to globalization, and, at least in perception, its promoter. That reputation galls him. "I scratch my head and say, 'But, look, I have a whole chap- ter on the un-flat world!' " he said. "And I probably coined the phrase 'the backlash against glo- balization,' in 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree.' " His view of globalization is that, "if shaped right, it could do more good than harm"-and he wondered if readers sometimes mistook his delight in explanation for glib celebration. ''It's ex- citement about learning and connecting dots in a way that I share with you- ' E ka "" ure . Of course, the response to Friedman's ideas goes well beyond "Eureka." I re- cendy spoke to Jordan Cohen, an execu- tive at Pfizer, who read "The World Is Flat" on its publication, and was directly 62 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 10, 2008 moved to set up a system that allowed Pfizer staff to outsource various office tasks-spreadsheets, Power Points-to contracted companies in India. This was around the time when the company was cutting ten per cent of its workforce. The book "gave me a conceptual frame, but it also gave me a list of companies and peo- ple to call," Cohen recalled. When asked about those who have brought his writing into the workplace, Friedman said, "It's a purely intellectual exercise for me. What theyre doing with it is fascinating, it's a little intimidating, but it's out of my control." Friedman is acutely aware of his strengths as a com- municator, in the abstract, but is less com- fortable acknowledging his real-world influence-perhaps, in part, for fear of seeming to crave power. (In our conversa- tions, he was at pains to head off any char- acterization of himself as a "Davos Man" operator-"All I'm really focussed on is: Did I communicate something? That's your currency, and if you debase that you're dead as a columnist"-and made the point that he speaks only rarely to po- liticalleaders: "I've talked with Obama once in my life.") Still, Friedman's books sell in the millions, and the column runs in dozens of newspapers, includingAsharq AI-Awsat, a leading pan-Arab daily. He is a hero to many Indians. He is waylaid in hotel lobbies around the world, including the Hotel Arctic, in IltÙissat, Greenland. State Department officials seek his atten- tion. In 2002, in a palace in the Saudi Arabian desert, in the middle of the night, Crown Prince Ab- dullah revealed to Friedman a peace proposal that he planned to put before the Arab League: full normalization of relations with Israel, in exchange for its withdrawal from the occu- pied territories. Mer Friedman quoted Abdullah in a column, President Bush sent George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., and William Burns, the Assis- tant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, to Riyadh to discuss the idea. David Rothkopf: a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, included Friedman in "Superclass," his recent study of what he calls a "global élite" of about six thousand people- "people who have the ability to influence millions of lives across borders on a regu- t . , \ / , lar basis." Friedman, he told me, "is one of a very few journalists I can think of who definitely meet that definition." Friedman understood the political and cultural context of Iraq well, but the prospect of war required him to make a choice-yes or no--and this did not come naturally. He knew that the judgment, once made, wotÙd become separated from its analytical roots. (In the event, that pro- cess was assisted by a clumsy comment Friedman made to Charlie Rose in May, 2003: he said, approvingly, that the Amer- ican presence in Iraq was akin to saying "Suck on this" to Islamic terrorists.) One can see a parallel, here, with Friedman's judgment about globalization-but that issue was never as bleakly binary, nor did it have the same immediate moral weight. Besides, the matter could be revisited: Friedman's later editions of "The World Is Flat" answered critics and reframed the issue. Similarly, when a world financial meltdown immediately followed the publication of "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" -"Hot, flat, crowded, and busted," as Friedman put it to me, wanly- he was able to start thinking of new ways for American dollars to reach the energy- technology industry, given the disappear- ance of venture capital, and of corporate appetite for risk. ("Green the Bailout" was a recent column headline.) The conversa- tion cotÙd continue. But the Iraq war was a different kind of conversation, and an adjustment- " I 2 0 " " I 3 0 " raq . or raq . -was not an op- tion. It's against that background that Friedman can at times sound confounded by his Iraq-war critics, some of whom, scornful of his ability always to see at least a glimmer of future hope, began referring in 2006 to a "Friedman Unit": a period of six months, starting at the present, dur- ingwhich events in Iraq wotÙd prove de- cisive. In his dressing room at the Letter- man show, he said, "My first column in Iraq was 'Hold Your Applause.' It's not like I've been sitting there on Fox News, saying it's all going great. I've basically been a critic since Day One." Indeed, in April, 2003, the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who was at the time largely supportive of the Bush Administration, criticized Friedman, saying, "You have to ask yourselves what it wotÙd take to get Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd to say anything, anything, positive about this administration and the military